SEO tips from the experts at Google I/O 2010

Google I/O 2010 hosted a SEO site review on May 20 in San Fransisco. Google I/O is an annual web developer-focused conference.

SEO experts, Matt Cutts, Tiffany Lane, Greg Grothaus, and Vanessa Fox reviewed several websites and gave SEO tips in order to optimize the websites for search.

Here is the video of the session:

Matt Cutts gave very simple SEO advice as well as more tricky SEO tips. Here are some reminders on how to optimize your website for search:

- Think what users will type when searching for your services and put those words on the page (entering text on your website pages is something you should always keep in mind).

- If you have pages with many images but without any text, it can be a good idea to allow comments and reviews, so that it generates content in your pages. Users will enter keywords in the comment for you ! See also our previous post on how to optimize your images for Google image search with 'alt text' and 'title tag'.

- Provide original content, so your visitors would like to come back to your website. Pages with duplicate content will rank worse than pages with original content. However, does Google really detect duplicate content ?.

- You can also stand up from the crowd by choosing an orginal domain name that can be more more brandable. It doesn't have to be the same kind of name as anyone else.

- Web CMSs such as WordPress and Drupal provide keywords in your page URL by default and this is very good for SEO. However, keep your version up-to-date to avoid getting hacked. 

- When you write a page URL, prefer dash (or period) over underscore. If you write a_b, Google will index one term, but most people tend to type 'a b', not 'a_b'. Read also our article about how to optimize Chinese URLs for Baidu.

- Having backlinks to your site is crucial for good ranking. However, you don't have to fight for each individual backlink. The best way to get backlinks is to provide content with value that differentiates yourself from the crowd and lead people to link to your pages.